One Volume, Many Vessels

If you’re planning on offing your self, then you really have nothing to lose by sticking around and seeing what happens in your life. That is, if you’ve given up, then you have nothing else to look forward to. And since you have nothing to gain, you have nothing to lose either by going along for the ride and seeing what happens. And you don’t know for sure either, maybe by sticking around you might learn something immensely important to you – through just experiencing the mess of your life.

Frankly, there are times in my life when I could have written the exact same words that you have posted. But hey, I’m still here. Taking it one day at a time.

Sure there is unbearable pain and sorrow, a wealth of despair and hopelessness. But you need to learn to swim through the muck of life with a light in your heart. In Buddhism we do this through practice: Actively aware of the muck of our lives, exhausted of it, eventually we grow weary of it and let it drop from our cares. (We don’t try to solve the muck, or figure a way out of it.) And in that moment’s emptiness we are renewed by the greater perspective we get from the ever-present reality of truth that transcends all of our little cares.

And in this way we learn, albeit sometimes slowly, that all that muck in our lives is not as overwhelming or important to us. We begin to learn about the source of that muck by watching it arise time and time again. And then we begin to be able to question the premise which that muck is based upon, because we can see it more objectively, not caught so overwhelming in the weight of its grasp.

But all this is from a step-by-step practice (one foot in front of the other, one day to the next), slowly realizing the way things are at the speed that the self can learn and absorb information, and transform its patterns through the process of trial and error.

I guess I didn’t explain correctly about the painting that I posted earlier. It was not an escape, a way to take my mind off my troubles. It was a meditation. That is I used painting as a way to actively engage in the awareness of my troubles, a vehicle for realizing them moment-to-moment fully in the present. I painted as I realized my burdens, “objectifying” them in a sense on the canvas, as we do in our lives.

The joy that you long for in your life in not unattainable, but it is not yours to relish now because you have some work to do in setting yourself straight in your life. Remember that the work you do now will make it possible for you to be open enough for love and joy to enter your life, without your holding obsessively onto it.

And when you do realize the higher truth of your existence, then in the joys that you find, you will be able to see that they don’t depend upon the state of such and such a relationship being present. But that they are a natural part of the splendor of the truth as it unfolds within your life.